public attention, though their authors had to endure petty persecution.
Five years later, Jowett and some other members of the small liberal
group decided to defy the “abominable system of terrorism which prevents
the statement of the plainest fact,” and issued a volume of Essays and
Reviews (1860) by seven writers of whom six were clergymen. The views
advocated in these essays seem mild enough to-day, and many of them
would be accepted by most well-educated clergymen, but at the time they
produced a very painful impression. The authors were called the “Seven
against Christ.” It was

[205] laid down that the Bible is to be interpreted like any other book.
“It is not a useful lesson for the young student to apply to Scripture
principles which he would hesitate to apply to other books; to make
formal reconcilements of discrepancies which he would not think of
reconciling in ordinary history; to divide simple words into double
meanings; to adopt the fancies or conjectures of Fathers and
Commentators as real knowledge.” It is suggested that the Hebrew
prophecies do not contain the element of prediction. Contradictory
accounts, or accounts which can only be reconciled by conjecture, cannot
possibly have been dictated by God. The discrepancies between the
genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, or between the accounts of the
Resurrection, can be attributed “neither to any defect in our capacities
nor to any reasonable presumption of a hidden wise design, nor to any
partial spiritual endowments in the narrators.” The orthodox arguments
which lay stress on the assertion of witnesses as the supreme evidence
of fact, in support of miraculous occurrences, are set aside on the
ground that testimony is a blind guide and can avail nothing against
reason and the strong grounds we have for believing in permanent order.
It is argued that, under the Thirty-nine